The use of smart phones and other computing devices connected to cellular telecommunication systems has drastically increased the amount of data being transferred by the cellular communications systems. In addition current cellular telephones are capable of using a wide variety of media and data.
The amount of traffic which is served by a cell can be modified by assigning users in the overlap area between two cells to one or the other of these two cells. In other words, there is a certain overlap or border area between two cells where the mobile terminal may be served by any of these two neighboring cells. Via an intra-system handover mechanism, mobile terminals can be assigned to the desired cell.
One mobile terminal is handed over from one cell to another according to the hand-over parameter settings in combination with the actual radio link conditions from the serving cell in comparison to neighbor candidate cells. The handover configuration settings controlled how early or how late the mobiles are handed over from one cell to another.